Building a Profession

This new teacher understands children and how they learn, can tailor
lessons to meet their needs, and can explain--based on research and
proven practices--how she makes decisions. In short, Samantha is a
professional.

This illustration, drawn from a portrait created by the National
Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, may sound too good
to be true. After all, the hurdles Samantha had to clear contrast
sharply with existing standards for teacher licensure. Most states only
look at whether a candidate has completed certain courses and attended
a state-approved teacher education program. But now, after a decade of
scrutiny and criticism, that may be changing. In fact, there are signs
that teaching is on the road to becoming a true profession. Consider
the following:

The National Board for Pro-fessional Teaching Standards, created
in 1987 to elevate teaching by codifying what expert teachers should
know and be able to do, this year awarded its first
certificates.

Spurred by the national board's work, a coalition of 38 states
has drafted model standards for licensing teachers that spell out the
knowledge, skills, and dispositions beginning teachers should
possess. Four states have adopted the standards outright, and 10 more
have modified them. In addition, 10 states involved in the
coalition--officially known as the Interstate New Teacher Assessment
and Support Consortium, or INTASC--are creating state-of-the-art
assessments to examine how candidates for licensure fare in the
classroom.

The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher
Education--commonly known as NCATE (pronounced en-cate)--continues to
strengthen its standards and press education schools to meet
them.

A blue-ribbon National Commission on Teaching and America's
Future is exploring ways policymakers can overhaul the preparation,
recruitment, selection, induction, and professional development of
educators.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, with the
support of the nation's two major teachers' unions, are studying
innovative ways to pay educators that would, among other things, take
into account specific skills and expertise.

Observers say all this activity is reminiscent of the strides taken
some 80 years ago in the medical profession. "If you think about how
long it took to professionalize medicine, it was a generation,''
observes Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of
Teachers. "This is the beginning of the generation that will
professionalize teaching.''

James Kelly, president of the national teaching board, agrees. "The
teaching profession is taking major steps to take responsibility for
its own standards, for defining expertise, codifying it, and measuring
it,'' he says. "Having said that, though, I don't pretend that we're
there yet. We have a long way to go.''

The current reforms were sparked, in large measure, by an
influential 1986 report from a task force of the Carnegie Forum on
Education and the Economy. The report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for
the 21st Century, called for the creation of the national board and
urged changes in schools that would make teaching a more attractive
job.

Since then, the drumbeat for improved student achievement has
strengthened policymakers' resolve to professionalize teaching. Higher
standards for students, they have come to see, cannot be met without
skillful, well-trained teachers. "This is the most important initiative
to transform schooling going on in the country today,'' says Linda
Darling-Hammond, executive director of the blue-ribbon commission on
teaching. "We cannot do any of the other reforms if we don't do
this.''

Darling-Hammond, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers
College, acknowledges a heightened rhetorical commitment to the
importance of good teaching, but she also notes that decades of
emphasis on the routine and less skilled aspects of classroom work
still heavily influence how teachers and schools are managed.

The current push to get students to think critically, synthesize
information, and create knowledge, she says, mirrors reform efforts
around the turn of the century and in the 1930s and 1960s. Each time,
she writes in a paper prepared for the commission, the momentum was
"killed by an underinvestment in teacher knowledge and school
capacity.'' And each failure led to a backlash favoring standardized
teaching and learning.

Over the last few years, NCATE has tried to coordinate a number of
the professionalization initiatives. Recently, it launched the New
Professional Teacher Project, a $2 million effort to strengthen and
link three quality-assurance mechanisms--accreditation, licensure, and
certification.

(Many teachers use the terms certification and licensure
interchangeably, when, in fact, they refer to two distinct procedures.
In most professions, states are responsible for licensure, while
professional bodies grant certification. Until the creation of the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, no such body
existed for teaching.)

Although the quality-assurance effort may seem somewhat peripheral
to schooling, its proponents believe it will have a tremendous impact
on classroom practice. By toughening accreditation and licensing
standards and creating a new certification system to recognize
accomplished teaching, they hope to force the nation's schools of
education to improve their programs. Stronger preparation programs,
they argue, will turn out better teachers. And this new generation of
teachers will have the know-how and confidence to guide student
learning and transform their schools.

One strand of NCATE's proj-ect involves revamping standards for
preparing teachers in mathematics, English, and other subject areas.
The standards, to be created in partnership with subject-area teachers,
will define the knowledge and skills teaching candidates should have,
rather than the content of courses that education schools should offer.
Arthur Wise, NCATE's influential president, believes these new
"performance-based standards'' will serve as guideposts for education
schools redesigning their programs and for states creating new
licensing systems.

Stakeholders in the professionalization effort are now taking their
message to the states, arguing the benefits of creating a serious
quality-assurance system. According to Wise, teaching currently
possesses "a pale imitation'' of such a system and has suffered as a
result. It is up to the states to fix the problem, Wise says. "The
state,'' he explains, "is where the action is.''

One key to making teaching a profession, Wise, Darling-Hammond, and
others believe, is the creation of autonomous state boards to set
standards for teacher licensure. Such state bodies currently regulate
who can practice medicine and law. Eleven states now have this kind of
board for teaching.

In a new book, A License To Teach: Building a Profession for
21st-Century Schools, Wise and Darling-Hammond argue that state
legislatures and agencies, which traditionally have set and controlled
standards in teaching, have "a conflict of interest in enforcing
rigorous standards for entry to teaching, since they must ensure a warm
body in every classroom--and prefer to do so without boosting wages.''
Autonomous boards, they point out, would not be tempted, as states
often are, to ease standards when fully prepared teachers are in short
supply; they would maintain the integrity of the profession and the
schools.

A major factor behind the overall push to professionalize teaching
has been a shift in the focus of educational research. Instead of just
doing surveys and crunching numbers, more and more researchers are
spending time in schools and talking to teachers. The change has helped
build the knowledge base about classroom practices that work. Until
recently, teaching has lacked a professional consensus about good
practice, which is why, many observers contend, standards have been so
lax.

The new research is slowly beginning to alter the way colleges of
education prepare teachers. Dozens, for example, have created training
programs in real-life public schools. In these professional development
schools, often likened to teaching hospitals, professors and classroom
teachers work side by side, training new teachers. The programs
exemplify the closer connection between teacher preparation and
schooling that many experts believe is essential.

Says Darling-Hammond: "We're taking what we know about teaching that
supports kids' learning and saying, 'My goodness, you ought to master
that knowledge in teacher education, demonstrate you have it before
you're licensed, and continue to develop it throughout your career.'
''

--Ann Bradley

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